Have a Material Christmas

By Dr. Gene Edward Veith

The American Religion, a book by the eminent scholar Harold Bloom, is not about Christianity. America’s true religion, according to Bloom, is Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is a Greco-Oriental religion that tried to attach itself to Christianity in the first centuries after Christ. Gnostics reject the physical, objective realm of matter. Only the “spiritual” is worthwhile. Salvation comes from neither faith nor works but from knowledge. Gnostics cultivate an inner spirituality that has nothing to do with matter, objective truth, or the body.

The early church condemned the Gnostics as heretics. After all, since the Gnostics believe the material world is intrinsically evil with no spiritual significance, they rejected the creation, the incarnation, the redemption, the church, and the Sacraments. They were also notoriously open to sexual immorality, since what they do with their bodies also has no spiritual significance.

Bloom says that every religion that had its origins in America is essentially Gnostic. He sees elements of Gnosticism in the New Age Movement, Mormonism, and even American evangelicalism with its highly interior piety and its indifference to Sacraments, denominations, and objective doctrines.

Bloom, who considers himself a Gnostic, thinks this is a good thing. In fact, overt Gnosticism has come in vogue. Feminists like it since Gnostics believe the body does not matter, so there is no significant difference between men and women. The bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, with its combination of occultism, feminism, and anti-Christian polemics, is distinctly Gnostic, going so far as to exalt the ancient heretical Gnostic writings over the books of the Bible.

According to the Gnostic approach to Scripture, the God of the Old Testament is evil, since, after all, He is responsible for making this evil material world. The serpent offered Adam and Eve knowledge (“gnosis”) so that what Christians understand as the fall into sin is actually salvation. This blasphemously topsy-turvy theology, which insists that God is bad and Satan is good, is copied directly by Philip Pullman in his popular fantasy series His Dark Materials.

As for Jesus, the Gnostics consider Him an enlightened spirit being. But they deny that Jesus came in the flesh.

The Apostle John was taking on the Gnostics when he referred to a great test of who has the Holy Spirit. This is determined not by some inner experience, much less speaking in tongues, but by confession: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God” (1 John 4:2-3).

St. Paul was dealing with Gnostics when he dealt with the two sides of the Gnostic coin, both immorality and asceticism. He told the Corinthians that misusing their bodies for sexual immorality is spiritually significant (1 Corinthians 6:12-20), and he told Timothy to teach that “everything created by God is good” (1 Timothy 4:4).

Gnostics then and now cannot get their minds around the astounding revelations of the Christian faith: that this real, tangible world we live in is the gift of a loving God; that God became flesh in Jesus Christ, who was born into this world as a baby to suffer and die on the cross and rise physically from the dead. Furthermore, our Christian Gnostics cannot get their minds around the fact that Christ uses the physical waters of Baptism to bring sinners to Himself, and that He still comes to us in His Body and Blood in physical bread and wine.

Christmas is all about the non-Gnostic, objective truth that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. Some people complain that Christmas has become too materialistic. If by that they mean its meaning is obscured by greed and commercialism, perhaps they have a point. But the gifts and decorations and celebrations remind us that Christianity is indeed a faith that— contrary to the Gnostics—is grounded in materiality. So have yourself a material Christmas.

Dr. Gene Edward Veith is the cultural editor for WORLD magazine, and is the Director of the Cranach Institute. He is also an editorial associate with Higher Things.